


Prometheus Revisited

by Mangokiwitropicalswirl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-27 00:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8381083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangokiwitropicalswirl/pseuds/Mangokiwitropicalswirl
Summary: AU created for "X Files Revisited" challenge on Tumblr





	

This was not the way they’d planned, she thinks. She had not anticipated the need for deception or seduction. When the plans were originally drawn, she was always meant to be the lynchpin -- the donor and the host. He was always the intended father.

 

She would never consider her part criminal. Quite the opposite. She was a true believer from the outset. And, she did love him. This was for all their sakes.

 

Whether he once loved her doesn’t matter. She knows at very least there’d been desire. There’d been desire, companionship and shared discovery. There’d been affection too, and she had counted on that affection to see this through.

 

But none of them had fully factored in his partner. There were endless notes, of course, and surveillance. They’d gotten good at using her to keep him dizzy, keep him frantic, keep him from straying too far from where they wanted him to go. They’d taken her and brought her back, given her cancer and taken it back. They’d watched him flail and worry and spin, guilty at her sufferings. They’d watched it all unfold, saw them orbit one another like twin planets, saw them tilt at every windmill, and then each drive home alone. They’d seen it all and still missed the crucial detail. 

 

How could they have thought he wouldn’t love her? Somewhere in their machinations, they forgot to factor in the heart, and the ways it can’t be measured or counted on to behave as its profile might suggest. 

 

She understands the depth of their miscalculations now as he pushes her away in his fevered state. He asks for her again and again even as she strokes his chest, laying her body alongside his, offering him a way back into their old passions. He is barely lucid, but says her name like a prayer, pushing away from what is being offered to him, what would be so comfortable for him to accept. 

 

Eventually he falls into a fitful sleep, his murmurings becoming more and more distracted. It’s too late now. They’ll have to find another way.

 

She rises naked from the bed and silently makes her way to the phone. “Sir,” she reports, “I was unsuccessful. We’ll have to consider other options.”  
______________________

 

The option she had not considered was her own irrelevance to the mission. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she’s only distantly aware of her own body and how they’re harvesting its seeds before she dies. She hadn’t known who pulled the trigger, but when they brought her in, the only thought had been for the material, its safety in her womb. She was nothing but an incubator, and having failed to achieve the required fertilization, just wasted space.

 

This was always the cold calculation by these men who saw reproduction as merely a sum of parts, a matter of mechanics, test tubes and cell division. No warmth of human love, no sparks of passion, no participation in the creative forces of nature. No. They’ve stripped it down to engineering and science. Women are an afterthought, an unfortunate necessity.

 

Of course, there would have been some part of her involved. She’d provided half the raw material for the project. All those years in Europe were spent in laboratories as they perfected the process of manipulation so that each egg now held the missing key, the sequenced genome of a better race. A better race that would have looked and sounded just a bit like her.

 

Her last sensations are of being hollowed out. They’re taking back their seeds. She feels needles drawing them from her abdomen. She knows what they’ll do next -- freeze them, store them, try to find another way to mingle them with him. 

 

For some reason, his part in this is never questioned. Men and their self-importance, she scoffs, slipping from consciousness as the bullet finally moves her toward the light.  
____________________

 

Now that they know he loves her, it’s just a matter of waiting them out. That and finding a way to give her back fertility.

 

The science is simpler now than when they took her the first time. Then, it had taken months to get what’s needed, which is what they had done. Taken her material and stripped it for parts. There’d been nothing left. Even the spare vials he had found were rendered useless, as her attempts at IVF had proven futile.

 

But now, these things can be done more quickly. Practically overnight, and practically undetectable. Painless.

 

Once surveillance shows the two of them no longer driving home alone, they start again.

 

It takes surprisingly little to entice her to follow the old man. Her altruism always was her own undoing. And when she falls asleep that night, they’re ready, quickly assembling at the door with all the parts, the needles, the anesthesia, the frozen vials of Diana’s eggs. 

 

The next day, she is furious with accusation, but remembers and feels nothing. There are no needle marks, no swelling. No soreness or tell-tale bleeding. It has all been utterly imperceptible. 

 

The eggs are tucked away and waiting. And from what they’ve seen of the two of them, it won’t be long now until they start to grow.  
___________________

 

There’s never been a question of loving their son, but at times when Scully looks at him, it’s like she’s never known him. The shape of his nose was always like his father’s, but as he grows, his light hair darkens, and his eyes change. Putting aside all the unexplainable things she’s witnessed -- levitating objects, never falling ill, his erie prescience -- sometimes when she holds him, she feels like she’s holding a stranger. Someone only visiting, something that was never hers to begin with.


End file.
